What does an infrared camera do? If you are thinking of using or requesting infrared for a home inspection, the first thing you need to understand is that infrared cameras are just fancy thermometers; they translate surface temperatures of objects into colors thereby creating an image comprised of temperature differentials. That is all they are. …
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Water Pressure is Tricky to Understand
Does This House Have Good Water Pressure? A common question Home Inspectors are asked: “Does this house have good water pressure?” While this is a great question in theory, a deeper understanding of plumbing systems reveals that this is usually the wrong question to ask. Understanding the difference between water pressure and functional flow will …
Limited Pre-Inspection?
Are You Asking for a Pre-Inspection? The Seattle Home Inspection Problem With record-low levels of housing inventory, historically low interest rates and swarms of eager buyers in bidding-wars over the same house, there is a lot of pressure on home inspectors in the Seattle area to cut corners. The problem is, home buyers have no time and …
ScribeWare for Sewer Inspection Reports
Sewer inspections with a sewer scope? It was not long ago that home buyers bought houses without hiring a company to run a camera down their sewer line to inspect the condition of the underground sewer pipes; buyers simply had to take the risk that the sewer line would not require repair. I can still …
Looking at Brick Houses – Expensive Repairs v/s the Advantages of Brick
Brick is one of my favorite siding systems; it is durable and elegant. When it is well-installed and maintained, it can last for the life of the building. I sometimes see brick siding that is 80 years old and hardly any maintenance has been done in all that time; imagine how many paint jobs would …
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The ScribeWare System: A Home Inspection Software Solution
Is ScribeWare right for me? With so many home inspection report-writing software systems to choose from, how can you tell if the ScribeWare system is right for you? This blog will help you decide if this is the product you wish to feature as the cornerstone of your home inspection business. Your report is …
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Asbestos Need-to-know: Critical clues for Inspectors when asked about asbestos
Homebuyers have a lot of questions about indoor air quality and for good reason; most Americans spend at least 1/3 of their time every day inside their house and if breathing the air could make you sick, that is a big deal. Unfortunately, many indoor air quality problems are difficult to inspect for or …
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Open Loop Hot Water Systems
What should we say about these systems? Do you ever get those anxiety dreams at night? The ones where the train is coming for you and the lights are bearing down but you can’t get off the tracks because your muscles respond like molasses. That is how I feel every time I look at an …
What is Fire Seperation Versus a Fire Wall?
Understanding Fire Resistant Sheetrock Sheetrock is the building material used to make walls and ceilings in almost all new construction; it is the material that replaced the old lath and plaster technique which lost favor due to the relative cost savings of sheetrock. Sheetrock is a made from gypsum – a mineral mined from the …
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The 3 Most Common Reasons a Home Inspection Report Kills the Deal
Understand the bones of a house As you know, one of the many difficult parts of being a home inspector is delivering bad news. Nobody enjoys delivering bad news. But when you are hired to evaluate the condition of a building for a prospective home buyer, and there are many tens of thousands of dollars …
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